Bitter Hoax: Mandingo Strikes Again

DA Henry: â€œItâ€™s a terrifying thing for a community to hear that two Black men in a black Cadillac grabbed a woman and her daughter. Itâ€™s terrifying.â€

[Fleming’s View]

It has happened again: another one of those “Black guys stole Blondie” capers.

Most people, including the Pennsylvania police, were fooled this week when Bonnie Sweeten, a 38-year-old Feasterville mother of three, said two big, thuggish Black men abducted her after rear-ending them in the middle of the day.

A couple of large, dark-skinned bogeymen in a late model Cadillac took them and once in their fiendish grip, anything vile or vulgar could happen to the white females. The blue-eyed blonde added that the kidnapping occurred on one of the busiest streets in Bucks County outside of Philadelphia but nobody witnessed the crime or called the police.

A national amber alert was activated. The national media whipped into action, as CNN and all of the local news station interrupted programming to broadcast the cruel abduction. The big networks camped in front of her home and talked to all of her neighbors. Across the country, authorities flipped snitches, did impromptu raids in housing projects and stopped cars on highways.

Some savvy policemen said there was a hint of fraud in Sweeten’s fable, especially when she made several nervy cell-phone calls supposedly from the trunk of a car. There was no evidence of a screaming daughter tied up—and where were two towering, menacing Mandingos guarding her?

The American sexual and racist myth of the bestial Black man was totally at play again. The violent, rageful, sex-driven Black buck and the victimized white woman. You have all of the ingredients of the lynchings that most Black folks still remember. Remember Emmitt Till? Those historic sexual and racist stereotypes still translate to the national white consciousness today. White people are still afraid of Black men.

It’s all about sex. Calvin Herndon wrote about this disturbing trend in his 1965 classic book, Sex and Racism in America: “The white man claims that Negroes are possessed by a savage urge to have sex with white women, or more correctly, that Negroes want to rape white women…The desire to have sex with or to rape the white woman is a by-product of what racism, Jim Crow, and prejudice have made of not only the Negro but everybody affected by American bigotry.”

Susan Smith, a white South Carolina mother, used the Rastus effect to pump up racial tension after she drove her small kids in a car into a lake to their deaths. Charles Stuart, a white Boston store official, used the Rastus effect after he murdered his pregnant wife in a supposed carjacking by Black men. Massive arrests and searches of innocent Black men ensued.

Tanya Dacri, a sorry excuse of a mother from Philadelphia, used the effect to send the white community in the city into irate fits against Black men. Supposedly three Black men snatched her white child—but the police work uncovered that Dacri drowned and hacked up her infant son.

There was even a hint of the effect during the recent presidential campaign when Ashley Todd, a white John McCain volunteer in Pittsburgh, was supposedly jumped by a Black man who carved a “B” for “Barack” into her forehead. Sarah Palin later said Todd acted courageously. This deceitful event –a pure concoction—only put prejudiced whites into a racist frenzy. Authorities discovered the volunteer cut the letter into her flesh.

The Rastus effect still works like a charm.

Even after the Sweeten hoax was discovered, Bucks County District Attorney Michelle Henry confessed the power of the image of the big Black male: “It’s a terrifying thing for a community to hear that two Black men in a black Cadillac grabbed a woman and her daughter. It’s terrifying.”

What’s the truth in the Sweeten case? Sweeten and her 9-year-old daughter was found safe and sound by police at Walt Disney World. There was airport footage showing the pair going through security to board a domestic flight to Florida.

Authorities have learned that Sweeten withdrew about $12,000 from several personal bank accounts and are trying to find out where she got the loot. This was a well-planned caper, according to law enforcement officials.

“We believe that there were some domestic concerns with her husband and some financial concerns as well,” DA Henry concluded, thinking about the husband, the ex-husband, and the other children Sweeten left.

Some Black columnists are calling Sweeten white trash, a skank, and a sicko. That is wrong. It is the American society who believes in these dangerous generalizations and stereotypes.

It will be only a matter of time when another white woman will accuse a Black man or Black men of a crime.